Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, holds up Wednesday, June 26, 2024, with white gloves the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award given in fall 2023 to the five bipartisan “sister senators” who helped block a near-total abortion ban. Of the five, only Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, D-Walterboro, (far left) will return in 2025. (Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
The problem with the South Carolina Legislature is women: There aren’t enough of them.
The House and Senate are largely boys’ clubs and have been for a long time.
After the recent elections, women make up only 13% of the House and Senate. Meanwhile, women comprise 51.4% of the state’s population.
In other words, our Legislature is laughably unrepresentative of South Carolina.
Governing bodies should reflect the people they serve. Our House and Senate do not.
The problem becomes acutely obvious when a Legislature that is 87% male dictates abortion laws.
Women have a voice in South Carolina politics, but it’s drowned out by the mansplaining boys.
Elections this year drove our Legislature even further toward a full-blown bro-ocracy.
We went from having 27 women in the state Senate and House to only 22 women, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.
Among the women defeated this year were the three Republican “sister senators” who helped block a near-total ban on abortion. A six-week ban ultimately became law.
With no Republican women in the state Senate, lawmakers could enact a total ban or at least stronger restrictions on abortion next year.
Our state ranked 47th in the nation in the percentage of female legislators before Nov. 5. We may rank even lower now.
Women get things done
Women bring distinct perspectives and life experiences to the Legislature, inspiring a richer policy conversation.
Women in state legislatures nationwide tend to be less hyper-partisan and more pragmatic than men. They’re consensus-builders, said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of Rutger’s center.
The antidote to many of South Carolina’s ills could be pretty simple: We need more women in state elected office to broaden the debate and expand the practical answers to our problems.
As Margaret Thatcher famously opined: “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.”
Think of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer telling her male-dominated Legislature to stop dithering and bickering over road issues.
“Fix the d— roads!” she said.
Research has shown that female legislators file more bills, pass more laws, and bring more dollars back into their districts.
Former Republican Sen. Katrina Shealy, one of the ousted “sister senators,” had the Senate’s most winning record, with 14 of her bills becoming law in 2023-24, according to the Gazette.
In addition, female legislators bring an array of issues to the table that men often completely overlook.
Consider this: When state House Speaker Murrell Smith and four House GOP caucus leaders, all men of course, recently penned their top legislative priorities for next year, there was not a word about the sort of crucial issues female legislators often emphasize, such as domestic violence, childcare, food programs for children, and healthcare for struggling families.
South Carolina has the nation’s sixth-highest rate of domestic violence. As for childcare, U.S. News in 2022 ranked South Carolina near the bottom for affordability.
These are the sort of issues women care about because they often touch their lives directly or at least indirectly.
Women, as the traditional caregivers of society, tend to be compassionate and practical-minded on healthcare and family issues. If women had a stronger voice in the Legislature, South Carolina might have expanded Medicaid for struggling families long ago.
Our state remains one of only 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid. Not surprisingly, several of those states are, like South Carolina, are at the bottom in legislative gender parity.
South Carolina also ranks among the worst states in the nation for children, according to the annual Kids Count.
I’d bet a Legislature dominated by women would actively address children’s issues and, for an encore, they’d fiercely advocate for the summer food program for poor kids that Gov. Henry McMaster refuses to support.
But what are the priorities of GOP caucus leaders? They plan to focus their energies on school vouchers and “historic income tax cuts.”
The real education crisis
In short, if women dominated the Legislature, I’d wager that they’d govern differently and more humanely.
GOP leaders, in announcing their legislative goals, spoke about controversial school vouchers, which have produced mixed results in other states. But they completely neglected to address the real crisis in K-12 public education: The teacher shortage that left more than 20,000 students without a highly qualified teacher in the classroom last school year.
If women had a stronger voice in the Legislature, they’d probably draw more attention to South Carolina’s high rate of gun violence which devastates families.
It’s true that women don’t necessarily march in lockstep. And we shouldn’t vote for a candidate merely for her gender.
There’s no reason that male lawmakers can’t address issues often important to women: Childcare, domestic violence, children’s well-being, education, health care and gun violence.
But they don’t, at least not adequately.
It’s pretty clear the reason we elect fewer women to state office is because we, like other conservative Southern states, often cling to traditional gender roles. That means minimizing women in public elected office even as they make gains in the private sector.
That leaves us poorer and lingering at the bottom of most national rankings of well-being.
The lessons are clear: When we marginalize women’s voices, we all lose.